So, investigating the 35 Open results from Saturday, there are some obvious scoring errors going on. Yvonne from the ACA is looking into it but due to the huge fields, dudes who got lapped (including one of my team mates!) got lumped into the top 20. So three places will likely get relegated. Am I being an anal retentive beeatch? Ha! I guess so. You can call me a chump the next time you see me.

Nice pic from Ward's 'A' bike yesterday after the Open race in Evergreen. Epic say he and Boups:

Reader Comments (7)

I can't figure out why the officials don't just have a laptop and a simple program where you give it numbers as riders pass by and it figures out all the lapped riders, etc. And instead of all those silly registration sheets you just have a laptop there too. Just give them your license number and it figures out the rest. We can always dream. Love the blog, keep it up!

Honestly, these folks are doing the best they can and I have no complaints. Given the amount of attrition the ACA exec ranks are facing as of late, it takes some truly dedicated volunteers to sit out there all day long and just 'deal'. It's all good and as this is all grass roots out here in ACA land, the racers will help work it out. It takes a village...

You are correct though in that there may be some easier methods to collect rider info. If you are not using ankle transmitters which require a lot of infrastructure, then you still have a data entry problem whether using a laptop or good 'ol pencil and paper. Officials need to ensure they are grabbing the correct numbers and ticking off the correct number of laps against the correct racer. Given the consistent yet separated string of racers in a 'typical' sized cross race, it's a pretty effective method but when you get 60, 70, 80 or more people (and likely we'll see this as the popularity increases), it will become chaotic.

There were some serious problems in the 35+/4s too - the guy I finished with was given a place 40 spots ahead of me (yeah, we got lapped!). Chip timing is great - I've used it in XC ski races with 1000 in the field and it works. It would be nice to see it make its way into cross if we're going to have these big fields.

On the other hand, if the officials can't keep track of everyone, maybe they should just put all their effort into tracking the top 15 or so, and put everyone else down in the results as 'also-rans'. Bogus result lists don't mean much to anyone.